“I’m takin’ a little short trip to Echo Spring,” said Brick in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “Could I borrow some Scotch?” John Cheever asked. “I have a thing for this cold swift water,” wrote Raymond Carver. “Drink is an escape . . . All sensitive minds feel it,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. “Alcohol, that we use as a Giant Killer,” wrote Hemingway, to kill one’s fear. For John Berryman, “a brilliant martini” was a hangover cure.

Writers drink, Olivia Laing writes in The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, a book I did not think could rival her brilliant first book, To the River, but it does. She writes discursively on her six guys, mixing literary history, personal revelation, medicine, travel journalism, observation and human sympathy, and comes up with an impressive study of how humans treat their own pain. Alcohol — or any other drug — provides “mechanical relief from the mechanical oppressions of modern life.”

Laing quotes one addiction doctor on self-medication: “the use of alcohol to blot out feelings that are otherwise unbearable.” All of Laing’s male American writers, whose suffering she describes as she chugs around their American haunts, blotted out pain. Hemingway and Berryman killed themselves but the others slowly drank themselves to death. Fitzgerald asked himself why he “chose this God-awful métier of sedentary days and sleepless nights and endless dissatisfaction.”

The late journalist Alan Coren once lost his temper with prudes calling Beethoven a lush for having a shrunken liver “leathery in consistency and green-blue in colour, with bean-sized nodules.” In an essay titled “Go Easy, Mr. Beethoven, That Was Your Fifth!” Coren asked if after nine symphonies, 32 sonatas, seven concertos, two masses, etc., Beethoven wasn’t allowed a snootful every now and then. Bean-sized nodules be damned!

Creative types are famous for drinking like whales, the stuff streaming through them like krill, and young writers fall for such self-destructive glamour. But here’s the funny thing. After reading The Trip to Echo Spring, I agree with Laing that writers drink not just to ease the pain of pouring words onto the page. They’re soothing the primal wound of a terrible childhood. So is everyone else.

Laing links childhood trauma to adult mental and physical illness so strongly that conventional notions of addiction’s path may actually be flawed. Childhood is the making of us. Childhood damage will make drug use more likely.

Cheever and Fitzgerald were riven with anxiety about social status. Williams’ parents were an alcoholic catastrophe. Hemingway’s father was a suicide as was Berryman’s. Carver’s impoverished parents were violent, the father an alcoholic, and he described his adult family life as a “spiritual obliteration.”

It’s not just drink. We alter our states. We smoke crack, pot and cigarettes, we snort ruthless heroin, and jackhammer Vicodin long after our physical injury has healed, we swallow pills and gamble, have sex with strangers, shop, we stagger along the Danforth at night. Our fatal error? To do this too much. We self-medicate until the medication wins. We are ashamed of this; we are ashamed of the memories that made us do it.

I am interested in the sorrows that cause addiction, not the addiction itself. Laing describes what alcohol does to the human body: cancer, infection, rot, cirrhosis, shattered memory, emotional incontinence, actual incontinence, all caused by this toxic agent. She describes Cheever’s permanent “painful sense of shame and self-disgust.”

At this point, one yearns for these writers to light up a joint. Opiates worked beautifully for Coleridge. Drunkenness is the worst altered state, spraying physical and social damage like urine.

Justin Trudeau is dead right. If only we could legalize pot, harmless compared to alcohol, and let people drift away from their pain for an hour or two in their own homes. How mad to jail people for pot while encouraging them to swim across Lake Alcohol, salted by human tears.

Note: After reading Laing’s book, I went to her website, olivialaing.co.uk. She is working on a third book, about urban loneliness, and suggests research books that helpful readers might like to buy for her. Crowdsourcing! Knowing how badly writers suffer from our writing-is-free mindset, I clicked on the Amazon link and did so, feeling honoured and warmed.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.